Boehner letter offers Democrat-developed fiscal compromise

GOP legislators sent a letter to the White House urging a “fiscal cliff” compromise drafted by a former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton.

The plan, sketched out by Erskine Bowles in November 2011, offers “a balanced approach of significant spending cuts and new revenues from tax reform with fewer loopholes and lower tax rates,” according to the afternoon letter from Speaker of the House John Boehner.

“This is another attempt to jumpstart substantive, good faith negotiations toward a bipartisan solution that can be enacted soon, a stark contrast to the unserious proposal the White House put forward last week,” the letter reads.

The letter wraps the GOP’s conciliatory position around Bowles, who Obama picked in 2010 to co-hair the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform.

Bowles served as Clinton’s chief of staff, and ran for Senate as a Democrat. He’s a centrist liberal — not a progressive like Obama.

Both the GOP and the Democrats are trying to show the public they’re trying to compromise, in part because each wants to be able to blame the other during the 2014 mid-term elections.

That task is easier for the president because he was just re-elected and has support from a sympathetic media.

Bowles “recommended that both parties agree to a balanced package that includes significant spending cuts as well as $800 billion in new revenue… [that] would not be achieved through higher tax rates, which we continue to oppose and will not agree to in order to protect small businesses and our economy,” the Boehner letter said.

“Instead, new revenue would be generated through pro-growth tax reform that closes special-interest loopholes and deductions while lowering rates… [and would] curt more than $900 billion in mandatory spending and another $300 billion in discretionary spending,” the letter continued.

The letter was sent in response to last week’s proposal from Obama.

Under that proposed 10-year fix, Congress would raise taxes by $1.6 trillion and launch a new stimulus costing at least $50 billion. His proposal did not detail any cuts, but invited Republicans to propose cuts adding up to $600 billion.

The debate over whether to cut spending by $600 billion would be conducted in the run-up to the 2014 mid-term elections.

Moreover, Obama’s conditional offer to cut $600 billion would trim roughly 1 percent of the federal government’s planned $45 trillion in spending over the next decade.